Introduction

This article asks what might be the possibilities and the limits of what academic research might strive for when we engage with the politics of race. It argues for a reflexive engagement with the historically sensitive production of critical ethnographic knowledge. Ethnography and the anthropological tradition, challenged in much politically progressive literature on race and ethnicity as a form of exoticism, a medium of orientialism and a field of misrepresentation, need to be considered in interdisciplinary traditions of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences that examine efficacy and causality as central concepts of analysis.